Things I Learned This Week – #30

Offline this week I learned that 3 year-old boys’ nostrils can accommodate quite large chickpeas, what amniocentisis means, and that objects in your wing mirrors may appear more distant that they actually are… :-p

The 20-20-20 rule is a good one to follow if, like me in my new job, you spend a good deal of time looking at a computer screen!

I’m becoming increasingly tired of people saying they “didn’t have time” to do something. You are not Jack Bauer diffusing a nuclear bomb. I’ve removed the phrase from my lexicon and would urge you to do likewise, replacing it with something like “it wasn’t as high a priority as other things I had on”. If you still feel ‘time poor’, read this. Especially number 3!

Scott Berkun asks whether you can be a ‘great’ man or woman without being ‘an asshole’. An interesting point given something I came across a few months ago pointing out most Nobel Prize winners are also good self-publicists…

I am now accomplishing that goal. I am graduating. I should look at this as a positive experience, especially being at the top of my class. However, in retrospect, I cannot say that I am any more intelligent than my peers. I can attest that I am only the best at doing what I am told and working the system. Yet, here I stand, and I am supposed to be proud that I have completed this period of indoctrination. I will leave in the fall to go on to the next phase expected of me, in order to receive a paper document that certifies that I am capable of work. But I contest that I am a human being, a thinker, an adventurer – not a worker. A worker is someone who is trapped within repetition – a slave of the system set up before him. But now, I have successfully shown that I was the best slave.

A trading card game based not on cartoon characters, but dynamically generated information/images from open resources? #awesome

Data, Design & Infographics

David McCandless at Information is Beautiful has visualized Clay Shirky’s ‘cognitive surplus’:

Going for a job interview? Why not take your iPad as your portfolio? Here’s some tips.

Ushahidi, apart from being mildly unpronouncable, is a way to visualize distrbuted data – like, for example, the recent oil spill. Also free and open source from the same organization is SwiftRiver, a platform that uses algorithm and crowdsourcing to validate and filter news.

Now this is how to design a headphone case. Form and function. #awesome